The latest, Motion Pro II from Los Angeles-based CXC Simulations, is perhaps the most true-to-life experience yet—as you’d expect from a professional simulator and training tool that starts from US $54,000. At its pulsing heart is a new force feedback steering controller than understands the moves of more than 1,000 cars—classic and modern, street machines or legendary racers of every vintage—and mimics minutia like the brutal forces of the late Ayrton Senna’s F1 McLaren in mid-corner, the feel of tires as they wear, and the lightening of a car as its fuel load decreases.

The steering system directly connects a direct-drive servo motor to the steering shaft, eliminating belts and gears. CXC’s previous system could generate 2 newton meters of physical feedback, but the new one can deliver 16 Nm, enough to mimic the destructive forces of a real-world crash. That is, if the company cranked it up that high.“If you hit the wall in an Indy Car and don’t take your hands off the wheel, you’ll break your wrists,” says Chris Considine, a former racer and CXC founder. “Our wheel is a one-to-one replication of that, but we don’t turn it up that high. It’s the first time we’ve been able to replicate racing forces so high that it introduces liability questions,” he says with a laugh.

(Maybe it's just me, but I think it's cool as hell they have a racing simulator so accurate they could get sued for hurting you with it.)

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Nestled into the driving rig, pilots get a serious physical workout via low-mass motion generators that simulate up to 2 g’s of lateral force. Seat belt tensioners simulate powerful braking forces. Vibration generators pulse through the system’s steering wheel, chassis, pedals and switches, while panoramic video screens and a powerful 5.1 surround sound system fill in the other senses. The Motion Pro II is powered by an Intel Core I7 Extreme Edition. into a top-level flight simulator as well.